​So, all season long the History Channel’s Hunting Hitler is investigating this photograph of “Hitler” to “prove” that the Führer was alive in the 1960s. According to clips shown in the season premier, they found extensive similarities! Sadly, this is all wrong. As a correspondent pointed out to me after the photo made a return appearance this week, in fact, it is a picture of Three Stooges member Moe Howard, taken in the 1970s, part of a series of snapshots taken apparently on the same day in front of the same car. There’s a degree of humor in this since Howard parodied Hitler in You Nazty Spy (1940).

The "Hitler" photo comparison as seen on "Hunting Hitler" S02E01

The original Moe Howard photograph given in reverse above.

​I know I rag on self-proclaimed “mouth of the South” Micah Hanks frequently for his verbose writing style and tendency to use a lot of words to say nothing at all. I’ve tried to avoid his ersatz version of my own research interests as much as possible, but he has recently become infatuated with speculative fiction, particularly horror fiction, and with him crossing so directly into the material covered by my own books on the subject, I can’t help but point out where he goes so terribly wrong.

A few weeks ago, James Gleick released a book on the history of the idea of time travel. This produced a flurry of reactions in which various writers took issue with Gleick’s decision to start the history of the genre with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, a questionable choice given that even Wells himself had written a time travel story, “The Chronic Argonauts,” prior to The Time Machine. In an article yesterday, Hanks joined the chorus, weeks late and with nothing new to add to the discussion except to splice into it ancient astronaut claims about how passages from the Mahabharata and (unmentioned by Hanks) the myth of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (in various ancient texts and the Quran) and Abimelech (in 2 Baruch) sounds like Einsteinian time dilation. (Ancient Aliens did a whole episode on this back in 2012.) He repeats much of the same material that dozens of other critics listed, but he says something that shows his superficial understanding of the subject: “Although it cannot be argued that Wells had a particularly significant influence on the way time travel began to be conceptualized in literature, we must recognize that he wasn’t the first to posit that travel backward in time might exist.” I honestly can’t tell whether Hanks is simply incompetent as a writer and meant that it can be argued, or whether he is so uncertain about the history of speculative fiction that he fails to recognize the singular influence that Wells’s novel had on the shape that time travel narratives took going forward.

But this was nothing compared to Hanks’s discussion of cosmic horror in an article that celebrates the release of a new collection of William M. Sloane’s horror fiction. Here he opens his article:

​Many scholars of the macabre would tell us that when it comes to horror, the varieties of the frightful experience are not all equal. Often in the horror genre, we are given those stories which terrify and tantalize us in a “real world” sense; after all, what could be more frightening than the relatable fears of the murderer next door, the lingering threat of the chance accident, or the general fear of the unforeseen things we may face it in the world each day. […] However, there are other kinds of horror too, which bring to light things far-removed from the everyday, and which arouse fear in ways that are unforeseen, and even unimaginable.

​In a very scattershot way, Hanks is trying to delineate the difference between supernatural horror and what we might term the contes cruels, or non-supernatural horror, but he has conflated it to a degree with H. P. Lovecraft’s special cases of weird fiction and the subgenre of cosmic horror.

I’m also a little insulted by the idea that some flavors of horror are superior to others. Granted, Hanks is not wholly wrong that many older scholars of the genre, H. P. Lovecraft predominantly (from whom Hanks is quite clearly cribbing), have held particular horror traditions to be the highest expression of the genre. We find similar arguments in recent years with critical contempt for “torture porn” and other distasteful productions. (I am not immune from criticizing that trend, which has now mostly burned out.) But the elitist attitude that the experience of horror art can be ranked by genre—cosmic horror, weird fiction, supernatural fiction, contes cruels, on a descending scale—and that some versions are “better” than others is wildly outdated, though sadly more prevalent than one might think, largely because the horror genre retains the air of the unrespectable, and those who enjoy it concoct a variety of justifications for why their favored branch of speculative fiction deserves to join literary fiction in the pantheon of worthy reading for the wealthy and well-connected.

To this I want to add one more point that Hanks made and that I disagree with heartily. Consider this sentence: “Lovecraft certainly managed to tap into a legitimate sense of fear with his sort of ‘cosmicism’, and bleak though it was, his also rose to a sort of prominence which has remained unparalleled in the minds of many of his contemporaries, as well as modern critics.” Let’s leave aside the awkward grammar—Lovecraft’s contemporaries, like him, are all dead now, and the present perfect construction is therefore inappropriate. (Well, I suppose it’s not wholly impossible if we expand “contemporary” to its widest possible meaning: Someone born when Lovecraft died would today be 79, though anyone reading his fiction during his lifetime would presumably be at least 89 today.) No, I am concerned about the use of the word “legitimate.”

One might argue that Hanks is simply too poor of a writer to understand what he implied by a “legitimate sense of fear,” perhaps using “legitimate” as a verbal tic akin to the way “literally” has come to serve merely as an intensifier. But I will take Hanks at his word that he means what he says. His use of that word suggests that there is an illegitimate sense of fear, reinforcing his earlier suggestion that some branches of horror fiction are inherently superior to others.

I have always been a believer that the distinction between high culture and low culture is largely artificial, and in my 2008 book Knowing Fear, I took pains to contrast the elite version of horror fiction with the low culture horrors, from the blue books of the Gothic era to the Syfy original movies of today, that represent how the public actually experiences horror. It’s worth noting here that in the Victorian era, horror fiction (as a division of supernatural fiction) was part and parcel of cultures high and low, and it is really only in the twentieth century that the supernatural in fiction became the poor, bastard stepchild of literary realism (and its even more restrictive subset of naturalism). The elites of that century consigned the supernatural to the masses while they flattered their intellects by imagining that the realist mode better represented reality as it was lived. It was an artificial choice, as fake as the mid-Atlantic accents that the same elites feigned to further separate themselves from the hoi polloi.

I don’t mean to embrace the postmodern idea that value judgments are impossible. I hate vast swaths of crappy, poorly written horror. But I don’t think we can justifiably argue that some genres of horror are inherently superior to others because of their genre rather than the quality of their production. Micah Hanks, in skating across the surface of depths he does not understand, perpetuate ideas even he would probably disagree with were he to think about them beyond the superficial.

It's the perfect way to disappear. Adolf Hitler was clearly Moe Howard all the time. He used highly advanced alien technology reverse engineered by Werner Von Braun to build a teleportation devise. Using this devise he was able to zip from Berlin to Hollywood, make a few Stooges movies, then zip back to Berlin and once again be the beloved Fuhrer. After the fall of the Nazi regime, Adolf simply made one last trip from Berlin to Hollywood, after getting a body double to commit suicide of course, where he took on the persona of Moe Howard for the rest of his life. This explains why his underlings quickly burned his body. It all makes sense.

Reply

Kathleen

12/1/2016 11:01:40 am

Clever to think of posing as a Jew to cover his tracks

Reply

DaveR

12/1/2016 11:45:25 am

Extremely clever.

MartyR

12/4/2016 03:29:59 pm

Remind me to kill you later.

Shane Sullivan

12/1/2016 12:25:28 pm

A distant relative of mine actually directed many of the Three Stooges movies, and from everything I've heard, there's like, almost virtually no chance that Moe Howard was Hitler. Like, I'm 70-80% sure.

Reply

DaveR

12/1/2016 02:46:22 pm

That still leaves a 30% to 20% chance that Moe Howard was Adolf Hitler. That's more than enough for the fringe to make a TV show.

crainey

12/1/2016 02:08:20 pm

Who then are Larry and Curly?

Reply

Ken

12/1/2016 05:55:35 pm

I don't know about the Howards, but I know for a fact that Chuck Barris and Muammar Gaddafi are/were the same dude.

Shane Sullivan

12/1/2016 09:20:13 pm

Shemp, however, was definitely Francisco Franco.

Tom

12/1/2016 11:12:53 am

The decline of the supernatural in "literature" coincided with its rise in the film industry where even the most tawdry tale was worth a few pennies at the cinema. Blood gore, shock and horror were far more immediately experienced than in a book.
Realism I think, is the novelists' reaction.

Reply

DaveR

12/1/2016 11:47:08 am

All joking aside, there's probably someone who would believe the story Jason was commenting on, and perhaps even what I've written.

Reply

Kal

12/1/2016 11:47:59 am

Moe Howard was younger than Hitler. Also he played him as a joke, ironically because he was Jewish. Top take much of anything the Three Stooges did literally could be scary.
"Oh, a wise guy, aye?" Poke! Yeah, they invented the meme to poke someone, long before the internet!

Reply

Shane Sullivan

12/1/2016 12:02:49 pm

I think Hanks mistook 'to be *argued*' with 'to be argued *against*.' I'm sure that's a common error among amateurs, since I didn't even notice it the first time I read his sentence.

Not that you're being overly harsh. Hanks is a published author, after all.

Ah, I see what you're saying. There is an ambiguity there, and I think you're right. The combination of poor word choice and the passive voice made it much less clear that it should have been. He probably should have said "contested" or "denied."

Reply

Shane Sullivan

12/1/2016 06:07:40 pm

Makes me feel sorry for people who bought his books without an "edited by" credit.

A C

12/1/2016 01:18:05 pm

I once read an article claiming that the rise of realism in fiction was rooted in an attempt to create a Marxist counter narrative to the general focus on and idealisation of the nobility present in most European fiction in the 19th century and earlier but I can't remember who it was by. Some SF author I think. The idea that an attempt to redefine the cultural value of the common man just turned into another way to fit into a elitist hierarchy by showing proving your refined sense of taste has a satisfying irony at least.

Going by the definition of 'horror' going back to Burke, treating it as a synonym for 'fear' doesn't seem right to me. Surely 'disgust' is also a legitimate kind of 'horror' in a way that is independent of how lazy any particular story might try to use disgusting things? I've read a lot of complaints about a horror story being more disgusting than scary but the idea that all a horror story is supposed to be about is scaring the audience seems simplistic.

I was hoping to write a short article on the history of psychic powers in Science Fiction with the intention on unpicking why these these contradictory subjects are so intertwined and this blog post just reminded me that as someone with terrible research skills I'm unlikely to have much to add. There's some clear influence from Theosophy in the idea that humans will all have supernatural powers in the future but I don't really know what the direct predecessors were to A.E. van Vogt's Slan which seems to have all the tropes fully developed. Bulwer Lutton's The Coming Race is a lot earlier and there must have been a lot of stuff in between that I just don't know about.

I suspect that Nandor Fodor's books were more influential than Theosophist ones in the 1930s but don't have the cultural historian skillset to find out. Him or William G. Roll had to have some influence on the 'psychic child' trope but Roll's popular books didn't come out until the 70s.

Its pretty clear that by the time Stan Lee created the X-Men in 1963 these ideas were just in the zeitgiest enough to be a simple excuse to not having to keep coming up with super hero and villain origin stories. Then these ideas just seem to have become even more popular in the 70s as the New Age crystallises and SF starts rehashing everything from the 30s to 50s in movie form (there are SF fans who write histories of the genre as though only films exist, that's almost a kind of horror).

Someone who reads fiction more than non-fiction would probably do a much better job of this than me.

You're quite right that fear and horror are not synonymous, and indeed a number of horror stories don't really try to frighten the audience at all. They straddle the genre borders, which tends to lead to all sorts of complaints about whether they are "really" horror. Saki's "Srendi Vashtar" is one of my favorite horror stories, though the author did not intend the audience to be scared by it, and it is sometimes not classified as a horror story at all. In the middle twentieth century there was a whole class of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" style horror stories that weren't really scary but weren't exactly realist fiction either. I lump them in with my broad definition of horror, but many theorists before me refuse to include them, some because they won't accept horror that lacks an identifiable monster. I tend to think of genre less as a box to classify things than as a porous line we draw around roughly similar things.

Reply

Alaric Shapli

12/1/2016 05:22:34 pm

"Sredni Vashtar"'s one of my favorites, too. It's interesting to me how a number of Saki's stories approach, overlap with, venture into, or suggest the horror or "weird fiction" genres. "The Music on the Hill" is probably the purist example, but I've found "The Open Window" in collections of scary stories. And then there's another one of my favorites, "Gabriel Ernest"...

K

12/1/2016 03:49:59 pm

I have never seen an episode of Hunting Hitler. What "provenance" did they give for the picture of Moe Howard?

A man in Argentina had a print of the photo and handed it to the "team" from an envelope he said that his family kept for decades.

Reply

DaveR

12/2/2016 07:45:50 am

Ah yes, the old; "In this envelope is a photograph kept secret by my family for decades because if the truth were revealed our lives would be in danger." tale.

And the suckers bought it without question. Reminds me about the tale of a certain Roman sword found on an island.

Killbuck

12/1/2016 10:00:09 pm

I attended Moe's funeral. It was attended also by a wonderful group of old Jewish vaudeville comedians... friends of Moe. Good thing those fellows are all long dead now, and not have to see such brainless, careless stupidity being foisted as history or fact.

Not exactly sure, but it would seem the investigators were neatly set up. The fellow seemed reluctant to provide anything they wanted, and then when pressed he produced a photo of Moe. They bought it hook, line, and sinker. I can almost hear the roars of laughter from here.

Reply

DaveR

12/2/2016 07:42:53 am

That's the problem with these guys, they take anything people say as absolute fact and the truth without investigating themselves. They take this photo and then attempt to link it to Hitler without considering it might be a photo of someone else. I'm not a huge Stooges fan but I could tell right off that was Moe.

Reply

Justyna

12/2/2016 02:13:48 am

Are they seriously trying to prove that Moe was hitler? All while actual hitler is waiting to get into the white house?

Reply

Only Me

12/2/2016 03:36:22 am

Hitler will have to wait another four years, at least. Trump won the last election. ;)

Reply

Titus pullo

12/3/2016 10:11:44 am

Does Trump have an obsession with UFOs? We might have had to deal with Podestas weird interest in the occult and aliens. That is one very strange guy. His performance when Hillary didn't have the guts to tell her people she got beat was so bizarre he looked like a scarecrow on acid.

Titus pullo

12/3/2016 10:06:49 am

I have to admit channel surfing last night the American Heroes station had some promo for a hitler show and darn if the older Hitler resembled Big Moe Howard! I can just see where this is going as some writer at committee films or another one of those fringe production firms is busy writing "The Hidden Hitler-his DNA and his Jewish connection to Hollywood😊

Maybe it was hitler in that classic stooges short when they retire the rich guys house...

Reply

Jim

12/3/2016 08:40:22 pm

What if Hitler didn't exist at all ? Who is to say that Himmler and his cohorts didn't invent him for plausible deniability reasons ?
What if they hired some stooge with acting experience to play the part ? What happened to Hitlers body ? Die anyone ever see Hitler and Moe in a room at the same time ?
Escape for Moe would have been so easy, shave off the mustache and walk to the American lines. If anyone challenged him he could simply say " are you nuts ? I'm Moe, yip yip yip yip, nyuk nyuk".

Reply

Residents Fan

12/3/2016 07:00:35 pm

I'd be loath to agree with Hanks, but The Sloane book sounds interesting. Especially since it's a "cosmic horror" book written by an author who wrote after HPL's lifetime, yet from the reviews it doesn't seem to use the usual HPL-style tropes for "cosmic horror".

I'm trying to think of other such stores- "Come and Go Mad" (1949) by Fredric Brown is another horror stories that draws terror out of the idea humanity is the plaything of hostile cosmic forces, and doesn't seem to be
following the HPL template either.

the idea of "legitimate" fear or horror is laughable, how do you tell someone who is scared they are not "legitimately" scared? superiority or inferiority of horror stories and of genres strikes me as
an issue of "by what standard?" Certainly Lovecraft genre (which
would include all modern writers utilizing his stuff and his pals ditto)
is spectacular. and it is in general a cautionary tale about messing
with the sort of stuff that "philosophers" and "theosophists" and so
forth encourage.

Reply

Lazlo Vandor

6/24/2018 12:29:40 pm

Catched my attention the statement "“Although it cannot be argued that Wells had a particularly significant influence on the way time travel began to be conceptualized in literature, we must recognize that he wasn’t the first to posit that travel backward in time might exist.”
Actually an excellent book about time travel is Mark Twain's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT, first published in 1889. If someone wants to read it, might download it free from
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86
Just for general information, a post in Wikipedia explores some historical "time travel" concepts in the world literature way before the "time machine" concept existed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel

Reply

Leave a Reply.

Author

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.